Re: Force a value:pair assignment to be string?

Clark C. Evans wrote:
> Kenneth,
>
> short answer:
>   You should be able quote those Y/N items to force them 
>   to be a string.
>   

OK, this is what I'm not doing now.

> long answer:
>   You might be able to configure your parser to not "implicitly
>   type" Y/N as a boolean value.  
>   

This had crossed my mind, but I was hoping you wouldn't say that :(

> longest answer: >
>   You've hit the #1 usability prooblem with YAML, it's called "implicit
>   type resolution" and different implementations are doing it
>   differently.  
>   
>   The original goal was to make it easy to type in integers and have
>   them show up as integers w/o littering your text with "!!int".
>   Unfortuntely, where that line should be drawn is a bit hard.
>   

Hard to argue with the original goal. 

>   In the next pass of YAML, I am going to recommend that all parsers
>   _only_ do implicit typing on:
>   
>     (a) symbolic values, such as <<, which can be used to 
>         augment the YAML syntax /w very nice hooks
>         
>     (b) numbers, "true" "false" and "null", following
>         the JSON standard (for compatibility)
>   

What about adding the feature which I thought from the docs was already 
present, a kind of variable declaration that tells the parser how to 
handle certain names.  In my case I would want to say

"For name:value combinations where name=="primary_key" make value a string."

This ought to give the best of all worlds, in that it would allow

a) implicit typing, which has some historical weight and strong arguments
b) name-level overrides, perhaps even descendent names like CSS
c)  value-level overrides, which I believe are already in there (putting 
!!int everywhere?)


>   At least, this should, IMHO, be the default.  I think Ingy begs
>   to differ and believes the default should be *all strings* with
>   no implicit typing.  What ever we come up with, getting there 
>   is sure to be unpleasent; but probably far less unpleasant than
>   the current state of affairs.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Clark
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 10:59:16AM -0400, Kenneth Downs wrote:
> | Hello!
> | 
> | I am a recent convert to YAML, using spyc to load YAML files to PHP 
> | arrays.  Very very nice.
> | 
> | There are many places where we have assignment pairs that look like 
> | "primary_key: Y" or "uisearch: Y", and YAML is interpreting these to be 
> | booleans and making them into 1/0 assignments.
> | 
> | It seems that with TAGs I ought to be able to force those particular 
> | keys to read as strings.  But alas, the documentation, while very 
> | complete, is also very abstract and lacks (as far as I could find) an 
> | example of this basic task.  Can anybody clue me in?
> | 
> | Thanks.
> | 
> | -- 
> | Kenneth Downs
> | Secure Data Software, Inc.
> | www.secdat.com    www.andromeda-project.org
> | 631-379-7200   Fax: 631-689-0527
> | 
> | 
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>   


-- 
Kenneth Downs
Secure Data Software, Inc.
www.secdat.com    www.andromeda-project.org
631-379-7200   Fax: 631-689-0527


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